This is the sound of slork, the Stanford Laptop Orchestra.
All instrumentalists are equipped with a black MacBook and a hemispherical speaker pod made out of Ikea tableware.
The brain behind the orchestra is Ge Wang, and if his name sounds familiar that’s because you might have seen it mentioned recently in connection with the superb app Ocarina.
Recently highlighted at apple.com, slork makes use of custom software written by Ge Wang:
“I wanted to focus on the intersection of music and computer science. So I authored a language with my advisor, Perry Cook, and researchers at Princeton and beyond. We called it ChucK. It’s a programming language completely tailored for sound. It let us quickly synthesize sound and use various controllers in our performances.”
These apples with Apple logos and products are the handiwork of a Japanese Apple fan (more pics on the site) who covered Fuji apples with custom Apple stickers, then waited a month them for to mature.
For the finishing touch, they added a leaf in afterwards in graphics. Wonder if these would be ripe for copyright infringement…
The battle to bring the iPhone to Taiwan became a bit more crowded as that Asian nation’s top carrier announced it will start selling iPhone service “before the end of the year.”
December is the tentative launch date for exclusive sales deal, Digitimes reported Monday.
In a brief statement released over the weekend, Chunghwa Telecom said it “has signed a contract with Apple, and it will provide third-generation iPhone services in Taiwan before the end of the year,” according to the Dow Jones News service.
I took quite ill on Thursday, and literally didn’t leave the house at any point between Friday and Sunday mornings. And, like a lot of bed-ridden people, I was in far too much pain to actually think about reading, writing, or, well, thinking. Instead, I got caught up on all of the junky entertainment I never find time for otherwise. Comic I hadn’t yet read. DVR’d episodes of Top Design. And virtually all of the content on Netflix Watch Instantly.
Now, for those of you who still haven’t had the chance to try out streaming Netflix, I will say that it works incredibly well. Movies start quickly, the new interface allows you to scrub through looking for your exact place, it resumes play if you accidentally quit. (I had a few films with skewed soundtracks, but it was a rare occurrence). What’s astounding, however, is just how tiny the Netflix streaming library is compared to Hulu, iTunes, or, you know, Netflix DVD service. After a few days in bed, I’d watched literally everything that I had any interest in seeing that the streaming service had. I mean, there are only two seasons of 30 Rock.
And that’s when it hit me: everyone who’s called for Apple to start a monthly subscription model for iTunes has been almost right. There’s tons of money to be made there. But the opportunity isn’t from making its full music library available for $15 a month. It’s in charging $20-30 a month for unlimited TV show access.
Think about it: Apple has the largest library of digital downloadable video on the planet right now. Sales haven’t been as good as hoped. Apple has begun to rent movies, which means it has the DRM to prevent people from keeping a permanent copy of a rented clip on their hard drive. And yet TV shows are still available only for $1.99 each. While that’s a pretty good price, it’s not one that I’ve paid since Apple first made TV available through iTunes (I briefly had 10-pack passes for The Daily Show and Colbert way back). But I would gladly ditch my Netflix subscription and pony up the same $20 a month for unlimited rentals of the TV shows on iTunes, even without movies. That’s $240 gross from me that Apple and the TV studios wouldn’t see otherwise.
Now, if it were anyone but Apple, I would say that kind of price is too high to pay. But this wouldn’t be a streaming competitor to Hulu — it would be for files that could work on any iPod or iPhone. That’s a compelling proposition right there. It would further cement Apple’s vertical integration as the premiere agent for digital entertainment on earth. It would make an AppleTV as essential as a TiVo. It could even begin to make the cable companies nervous if Apple’s selection continues to improve (live sports being an obvious exception).
I think it’s a slam dunk. Does it make sense to you?
We’ve written before about some of the creative ways Mac users act to protect their gear and to foil the nefarious intentions of would-be thieves. This week brings another, called MacTrak, from GadgetTrak, Inc., makers of the new anti-theft software for mobile devices.
MacTrak features location-awareness from Skyhook Wireless’ Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS) and integration with Flickr to capture the location and images of laptop thieves.
“Skyhook’s cutting-edge location technology allows our software to send the location of the device to the owner along with a photo of who is using the system, greatly increasing the chances of getting the stolen device back,” says Ken Westin, founder and CTO of GadgetTrak.
When a MacTrak-enabled laptop is stolen, the device owner can remotely activate tracking for their stolen system. Once the stolen device connects to the Internet, MacTrak determines the device location using WPS. It will also activate the Mac’s camera and photograph whoever is using the device. The image, location and network information are then uploaded to Flickr and an email is sent to the owner with the same information. Data will continue to be sent over time until tracking is disabled.
“Skyhook’s Wi-Fi Positioning can pinpoint the location of a stolen device within 20-30 meters even in dense urban areas or indoors, meeting the tough performance standards of security applications,” says Kate Imbach, director of marketing at Skyhook Wireless.
Designer Dmitry Zagga kept his iPod speakers simple: all you need for his CupSpeakers, dubbed the “iPod Ghetto Accesory” are four white paper cups (preferably from the company cafeteria) and a couple of toothpicks to hold them together.
By his own admission, “the increase in volume, of course, is radiculous, (sic?) but hey, you get stylish iPod accessory out of nothing!”
Go figure. Just like Tommy Hilfiger listening to Jimi Hendrix or John McCain listening to Abba, it goes to show there’s a little bit of the unexpected in everyone’s playlist.
The mildly entertaining redemption story of The Rocker hinges on a Mac. Serial-geek actor Rainn Wilson (Dwight Schrute from The Office) plays an almost-been heavy metal drummer called Robert Fishman. His niece, annoyed that she can’t do her homework, uploads a video of his sweaty practice session from her iMac. It goes viral. The rest is history.
The Google Mobile team is expected to enhance its iPhone search product with a voice recognition add-on as soon as today, according to a report in the New York Times.
Having already reorganized the way it delivers the results of an iPhone search request earlier this week, the Mountain View, CA search engine company is taking another step toward perfecting the way it handles the challenges of entering and retrieving information with hand-held wireless devices.
“Solving those two problems in a world-class way is our goal,” says Vic Gundotra, a former Microsoft executive who now heads Google’s mobile businesses.
With teams of voice recognition engineers working in New York, London and Mountain View utilizing trillions of search queries Google users have made over the years, one aspect of the service relies on a statistical model of the way words are frequently strung together, according to Mike Cohen, a speech research who was co-founder of Nuance Communications before coming to Google.
The service also takes advantage of the iPhone’s accelerometer to put itself into “listen” mode when the phone is raised to a user’s ear, a design development contributed by a Google researcher in London.
Both Yahoo and Microsoft already offer voice services for cellphones. The Microsoft Tellme service returns information in specific categories like directions, maps and movies. Yahoo’s oneSearch with Voice is more flexible but does not appear to be as accurate as Google’s offering, according to the Times report.
The Google system is far from perfect, and it can return queries that appear as gibberish. Google executives declined to estimate how often the service gets it right, but they said they believed it was accurate enough to be useful to people who wanted to avoid tapping out their queries on the iPhone’s touch-screen keyboard.
As of this writing the add on was not yet available on the AppStore, but as Raj Reddy, an artificial intelligence researcher at Carnegie Mellon University says, “whatever they introduce now, it will greatly increase in accuracy in three or six months.”
Apple is now Steve Jobs has said he wants to enter by the end of 2008. However, there may be several snags delaying the iPhone getting into the hands of the world’s largest cell phone market.
The new Apple employee would “focus on international releases of our iPhone and iPod touch products for Beijing,” the post reads.
Earlier this year, Jobs told CNBC he thought iPhone launches in China and Russia would “happen later this year.” Although Russia announced in October, an agreement with China has been held up by technologic and political roadblocks.
Photographer Russ Croop has been creating art on his iPhone using an app called NetSketch that allows you to draw using your fingers, like the above “Point Lobos.”
Croop’s colorful creations look more like art (check out his online gallery, where you can also watch them being made in video form) and less like displacement practice than most, but local galleries have not yet signed him on to show them, according to iArt Mobile.
Maybe art on such a small screen underwhelms them, assuming the idea is to show works on the iPhone, but it’s probably just a matter of time. iPod art has already found its way into galleries.
Dave at Newton Poetry makes a good point in his post One Used Mac Per Child about the culture of throw-it-away that pervades our society. We throw away so many old computers and monitors – still functional, most of them, but no longer fashionable – that we end up “poisoning another country and its people.”
What happened to the “make do and mend” attitude? It got swept away by cheap deals in malls, deals that made making do seem dumb.
Njection Mobile is a new iPhone app designed to alert you to speed traps, red light cameras, and speed detection devices using the phone’s 3G and GPS capabilities.
The app uses a native Microsoft Virtual Earth Web Services (VEWS) implementation, leveraging the mobile tile set to speed up map displays, and provides what promoters call “one of the best mapping experiences on the iPhone.”
Drivers may be alerted audibly to approaching speed traps based on several different criteria. The application uses an Active Intelligence Selection System to alert users to the most relevant speed trap, based on speed, direction of travel, and current time. Users can submit and verify speed traps directly from the iPhone as well.
The $9.99 application’s features include:
Speech notification of Speed Traps based on current moving direction, speed of the driver, and distance to closest point using Active Intelligence Selection System (AISS)
Live Updates of speed traps updated from the website or other iPhone users
Speed Trap Ranking based on level of enforcement and time of day area is monitored
Submit and Rate Speed traps from the iPhone or on the website
Njection Mobile is compatible with both 3G and Edge network protocols, though the developers caution it may not work as well without GPS.
Citing a “more conservative outlook for the PC industry,” Credit Suisse Thursday cut the target price for Apple shares to $120 from $135. Analyst Bill Shope also trimmed Apple’s 2009 revenue projection
Photo: Cishore/Flickr to $33.36 billion from $34.85 billion.
In a note to investors, the analyst reversed his projection of PC shipments for next year. Shope believes shipments will fall 4.7 percent rather than increase 4.9 percent.
Overall, PC industry revenue is expected to fall 16.6 percent in 2009, according to the Credit Suisse note.
Shope said his estimate is in line with an outlook for a “severe recession” in the PC market with a 13.7 percent drop in desktop computers compared to a 4.2 percent previously projected.
With consumer buying in the tank and computer makers reportedly readying $299 holiday PCs, can Apple afford to repeat its usual $100 discounts on Macs? One analyst thinks its time for Steve Jobs to get ‘aggressive’ during the all-important ‘Black Friday’ after-Thanksgiving sales.
Barclay Capital’s Ben Reitzes told investors Wednesday Apple should offer discounts on iPhones and iPods, as well as Macs.
“We would like to see Apple get more price aggressive in every product, including the iPhone, given obvious weakness in the economy,” he wrote in a note to investors.
Word comes from Le Macbidouille of Apple’s plans to set up shop in the “Carrousel of Louvre” at the famous gallery complex in Paris.
Slated to begin at the turn of the year, Apple has apparently expanded upon plans originally announced over a year and a half ago, and may become a very high profile tenant at an attraction that drew over 8 million visitors in 2007.
According to the report published at HardMac (conveniently translated into adorable French-English for the non-French-speaking reader), Apple has taken “many options in France, primarily in shopping malls in construction, such as the Odysseum in Montpellier,” and declared “2009 should be the year of Apple Stores in France.”
Here’s a gallery of the space Apple may be converting at the Louvre complex, and sure enough, you can almost see an Apple store in it, can’t you?
Fans of comics’ “Golden Age” now have a great way to feed that jones on the iPhone and iPod Touch with Comic Zeal from Bitolithic.
The $1.99 app lets you download an unlimited number of classic comics from the 1930s and 1940s, a period that saw the arrival of the comic book as a mainstream art form, when the medium’s artistic vocabulary and creative conventions were defined by its first generation of writers, artists, and editors.
The app downloads full comics to store locally on your device for easy access offline, and takes full advantage of the iPhone platform’s pinch-zoom and fingertip scrolling so you can move around pages quickly and zoom in to detail as you wish. A recent update makes turning pages with the swipe gesture a breeze and counts as an excellent improvement to the original released version.
“I had been itching to do some development for the Mac but when we learned the iPhone and iPod contained most of OS X I knew I had to do SOMETHING on the device,” Melbourne-based developer Emiliano Molina told Cult of Mac. “During that time, a colleague let me borrow some of his most precious comic books. The most leisure time I had was on the train but I couldn’t risk damaging them,” he says, “eventually I realized that what I needed was a digital version of those comics on the iPod.”
The Comic Zeal library contains an eclectic mix of titles that have fallen out of copyright, such as Romantic Adventures, Strange Worlds, Racket Squad and a personal favorite of this reviewer, Eerie.
Molina is also developing what he calls the Comic Zeal Creator, which allows you to convert the CBR/CBZ files of comics you find on the internet into Comic Zeal’s CBI format, so you can upload your own favorites to the iPhone for storage and later access. The Creator remains in Beta and can be downloaded from the Bitolithic website.
Apple released a significant update for 4th generation iPod Nano Tuesday night. Software Version 1.0.3 includes a number of fixes to cover art and photo distortion issues that some users had been experiencing, and delivers support for the eagerly awaited Apple in-ear headphones with mic and remote.
Although the headphones were announced in September when the iPod Nano line was refreshed, they have remained as yet unavailable.
Nano users can obtain the new software by connecting the digital media player to their computer and launching iTunes. Follow the prompts for downloading and installing the software.
Love this clear stand for the Mac Mini to make it look like a PowerMac G4 Cube. The only slight flaw in handiwork of Trademarklaser is the upside down Apple logo (due to the position of the optical reader) but an etched and painted acrylic cover that would set things straight is on its way. No word on price, but they are for sale.
Flickr user Mickphoto has put up a couple of extensive photosets showing how he hacked an MSI Wind to turn it into an Apple “netbook” he calls the MacBook Nano.
Many have expressed a desire for a small, super-portable Apple notebook and Mickphoto’s creation has a certain je ne sais quoi that’s sure to get the notice of Apple enthusiasts – if not the Apple legal department – and keep the netbook conversation going.
Click on a few shots in the gallery below and visit Mickphoto’s Flickr pages for more. Is this Apple evangelism, a labor of love, or is it over-the-top? Let us know your thoughts about the MacBook Nano in comments.
Apple faces “recessionary headwinds” through 2010, RBC Capital analyst Mike Abramsky told investors Wednesday. Abramsky now predicts 27.8 million iPhones will ship in 2010, down from 31.8 million. The analyst also believed Apple will report $46 billion in 2010, slipping slightly from the $46.6 billion previously expected.
Abramsky, however, still expects Apple will sell 21 million iPhones in 2009 and kept his target price for Apple at $125. Last month, the analyst cut his target price for Apple shares from $140.
What with all the talk about how hard it is to manage large numbers of apps with the iPhones swipey-sidey interface, I wondered what people are doing when it comes to visualizing the things. A computer’s screenshot is one large image (maybe two or three with multiple monitors). You could argue that an iPhone’s screenshot isn’t complete without all its screens – up to 10 of them – lined up side-by-side.
And that’s what some people are doing, in the process creating gorgeous little personalized maps of portable computing. This one by thepatrick on Flickr (used under Creative Commons license – thanks thepatrick), is labeled with descriptive notes that explain each geopolitical region.
If yoo fink Cheezburger haz a flavr, yoo gonna wuv dis iFone app which make da lolcatz go woop-wwop-ffloop in yor pocketz. It down-woads da lolcatz wivvout da web stuffs which crashy yr Safarie. Srsly.
(Alternatively, if you are an intelligent human being who hates lolcats and thinks this post would have been better suited to the Cult of Lolcats blog (coming soon), the Cult apologizes for wasting your time and suggests you move on to the next post. Thank you.)
Blake Patterson has the kind of monitor set up that makes some of us drool. It’s even sweeter when three monitors, plus Spaces.app, plus Exposé, produces an image like this; the symmetry and balance turns it into a work of art.
(Photo of Expose+Spaces used under Creative Commons license. Thanks Blake!)
